Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One and Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Bertram is also the author of the suspense novels Unfinished, Madame ZeeZee’s Nightmare, Light Bringer, Daughter Am I, More Deaths Than One, and A Spark of Heavenly Fire.

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Three years ago almost to the day, I wrote about living small, and I still live small. I leave a small footprint on the earth — driving as little as possible, walking wherever I can; buying little, recycling what I can; getting rid of what possessions I can, scaling back on what I can’t. I am also a small thinker. Though I like to think I think big thoughts, I actually get bogged down in minutiae and over thinking. When I listen to music (which is almost never), I keep the sound turned way down. I would like to write expansively, but I write small, dredging each word and each idea out of the depths of my mind. As you can see, I’m not one of those people who take a mile when given an inch. In fact, when given an inch, I generally only take a centimeter.

Back then, I was still at my father’s house. (I just realized — if he were alive, he’d be 101 today!!) I was living in two small rooms even though the whole 3,500 square foot house was at my disposal. In fact, keeping to my habit of living small, I hadn’t even removed the curtain on the glass doors that separated my rooms from the rest of the house.

When my sister-in-law came to help ready the house for sale, she commented on how full of contradictions I was, talking about living out in the open on some sort of epic adventure, but living behind a curtain in that house.

I conceded she had a point and took down the curtain. It wasn’t exactly living large, but it was a start. Or so I thought.

Fast forward to today. I am again talking about some sort of epic adventure while living small in a curtained-off room. (Not literally curtained off — this time the room is separated from the rest of the house by solid doors.)

It’s not as if I haven’t done anything in these intervening years — I did go on one near-epic road trip in my restored VW Beetle and I . . . Pausing here to think. Was that it? Just that one adventure?

Sheesh. I do live small.

I need more adventures!

In late April, I will be heading out for a five-week road trip to Oregon and Washington. It was going to be six weeks to two months, but I told my dance teacher I would try to get back at the end of May to do another performance at the local college with my dance class. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know I am ambivalent about it. I don’t like having to cut my trip short, don’t like having to travel on Memorial Day weekend, don’t like the idea of going back to the scene of my fall (the last time I did a performance at the college, I destroyed my arm). But . . . I love my belly dance costume, love the dance, and considering the state of my finances and the need to make a change one day soon, it might be the last time I ever get on stage.

So around and around I go.

Yep. Living small. Overthinking.

People have asked me what I expect from a wilderness trek of some kind, and maybe that’s the answer — to live large. Live large in the world. Live large in my own mind. Of course, then I’d have to ask my minutiae-oriented self what I mean by living large, and as with so much else in my life, I haven’t a clue.

Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One debunks many established beliefs about what grief is, explains how it affects those left behind, and shows how to adjust to a world that no longer contains the loved one. “It is exactly what folk need to read who are grieving.”(Leesa Heely Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator ).

Other books by Pat Bertram

Available online wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Grief: The Great Yearning is not a how-to but a how-done, a compilation of letters, blog posts, and journal entries Pat Bertram wrote while struggling to survive her first year of grief. This is an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.

While sorting through her deceased husband’s effects, Amanda is shocked to discover a gun and the photo of an unknown girl who resembles their daughter. After dedicating her life to David and his vocation as a pastor, the evidence that her devout husband kept secrets devastates Amanda. But Amanda has secrets of her own. . .

When Pat’s adult dance classmates discover she is a published author, the women suggest she write a mystery featuring the studio and its aging students. One sweet older lady laughingly volunteers to be the victim, and the others offer suggestions to jazz up the story. Pat starts writing, and then . . . the murders begin.

Thirty-seven years after being abandoned on the doorstep of a remote cabin in Colorado, Becka Johnson returns to try to discover her identity, but she only finds more questions. Who has been looking for her all those years? And why are those same people interested in fellow newcomer Philip Hansen?

When twenty-five-year-old Mary Stuart learns she inherited a farm from her recently murdered grandparents -- grandparents her father claimed had died before she was born -- she becomes obsessed with finding out who they were and why someone wanted them dead.

In quarantined Colorado, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying from an unstoppable, bio-engineered disease, investigative reporter Greg Pullman risks everything to discover the truth: Who unleashed the deadly organism? And why?

Bob Stark returns to Denver after 18 years in SE Asia to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again. At her new funeral, he sees . . . himself. Is his other self a hoaxer, or is something more sinister going on?